


screamin' at the cars, hey, i wanna get better

by sydneygremlins



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It of Sorts, Grief, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Open Ending, Post-Episode: s15e19 Inherit the Earth, Sobbing, Speculative, The Empty (Supernatural), and went into a haze and wrote this, finale AU, i can write proper tags., ok. ok. [composes myself], or: i thought about destiel and was very sad, switching POV, write proper tags, writing castiel winchester and crying does not mean i cannot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 23:21:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29767170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sydneygremlins/pseuds/sydneygremlins
Summary: It’s been a few months, now. Three.Three months without Cas.It feels like longer.He sighs and drops his head into his hands, knuckling his eyes. He wishes he could just get over it already. He wishes his sleep wasn’t tainted with dreams of tearful confessions and bloody handprints and the unforgiving weight of bricks against his back. He wishes… he wishes for Castiel.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 6
Kudos: 34





	screamin' at the cars, hey, i wanna get better

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for clicking. I hope you enjoy!

From here, the cars look like brightly coloured beetles, gliding along the highway. Dean sits down heavily on the grassy crest of a hill and watches how the sun catches on the Impala’s hood. 

It’s been a few months, now. Three. 

Three months without Cas.

It feels like longer.

He sighs and drops his head into his hands, knuckling his eyes. He wishes he could just get over it already. He wishes his sleep wasn’t tainted with dreams of tearful confessions and bloody handprints and the unforgiving weight of bricks against his back. He wishes… he wishes for Castiel.

When he emerges from the black behind his eyelids, the sun is painfully bright and his vision tinted blue. He stretches out across the grass, feels the individual pieces between his hands, sun–warmed and too soft for him to be feeling what he is — grief that sits, ragged, lodged in his chest like glass shards stained bloody.

Absentmindedly, he brings a hand to his left shoulder, fiddles with the fabric under which there used to be a handprint. A mark — the only one he’s ever found pleasure in bearing. The wind brings the warm taste of the approaching summer when Dean breathes it in. He’s trying to heal. He’s trying, but he’s missing something. 

The darkness surrounds him until he forgets his name. Forgets home. Forgets everything, even the touch of warm sun, even the colour of midnight. 

It’s cold here. So cold.

If he had a physical form to feel it, he might shiver. On some incorporeal level, he does — several pairs of wings and several thousand eyes shudder, stumble, but there is nobody to see it. 

He misses a home he does not know. 

He drifts back into eternal sleep. 

“I found something,” Sam says, thudding a book down on the table. It’s red, decorated with stripes of what probably used to be gold turned brown with age.

Dean blinks and lets the words filter through the haze of his mind which had been hovering somewhere adjacent to unconsciousness. “Huh?”

“A spell. I think if we tweak it a bit, it might work.” Sam sits down opposite Dean — they’re in the library — and begins turning the ancient pages with gentle hands. God. 

A way to get Cas back. 

They’ve been searching and he already decided that whatever happened, it would break him 

too much to hold any sort of hope. 

Still. Still. 

A way to get Cas back. 

“Jack still not answering?” Dean asks blearily, scrubbing a hand across his eyes. Something pained flits across Sam’s face. “No,” he says shortly. 

The dark expression leaves as fast as it came. Dean dismisses it and sits up straighter. 

“What’ve you got?”

Sam turns the book around. “Here,” he says, pointing to a paragraph of densely packed type. Dean squints at it and tries to decipher it but the words go wobbly before he can get a handle on them. 

He blinks. 

“‘Through only the most... the most — true love,’” he stammers, “‘can a soul be saved from eternal damnation to the void.’”

He bites his lip — hard. 

“D’you think it will work?” Sam says in the most gentle voice he’s possibly ever used with Dean — and he’s been so painfully delicate with him for the past few months. 

Dean grinds his jaw, and looks down to the table. He pushes the book away.

The most true love. 

What he feels for Cas — that’s the most true thing he’s ever felt. Through water, through fire, Cas has always been there. Even if they hate each other. Even if they can’t remember each other — he always finds his way back to Cas. 

“Yeah,” he says simply. 

Sam nods. “Okay.”

Then they’re pouring over the book and Sam’s notes and several related documents, well into the night. 

Unbidden, a tiny bit of hope sets root. 

There’s nothing around him. He knows that’s how it’s meant to be, but it is still disconcerting. Still upsetting. 

He misses … he doesn’t know. 

He can’t remember a name. 

Panic sends him flailing, but then he remembers he has no form. He’s not flailing. More … falling. His wings flap and find no resistance. 

How can’t he remember? 

The person he sacrificed himself for.

How can’t he remember?

He should. 

But in this place, with his mind filled with echoes of a life he used to live, he can’t. He remembers... flashes. A smile. A hand on his arm. A pile of dead leaves and a grin. A tape deck. 

A cassette. 

He remembers the writing. In a thick pen, the writing of someone who is usually careless with a pen but has slowed down for a moment, for something important. 

He hopes it was important. 

The name scrawled there evades him. 

He goes back to sleep and wishes for an out. 

“So this is the deal spell —”

“Yep.”

“— and this is the one to get him out?”

“Uh–huh.”

They’re set up in an abandoned farmhouse, because of something–something; it’s a better location for the exact magic they want to perform. Dean only remembers because Sam explained maybe a dozen times on the drive over, but even for all the logical reasons, Dean can’t help but remember how he first met Cas while he’s spray painting sigils onto packed earth. 

Sam seems nervous — Dean can’t tell why. He’s never been that hung over when Cas died before. He just dusts himself off and gets back to where his life was before. 

Dean half envies him. Envies how easily he moves on.

They go through several tins of spray paint before they’re done. Dean fusses with the edges to make sure they’re precise. Against his better judgement, he thinks it might work. 

Something is — pulling him. Something is reaching for the strands of his soul and almost grabbing it, brushing fingertips against the fraying. 

He stirs in his sleep and his eyes open — all of them — but the ethereal light of an angelic true form doesn’t budge the darkness of the void. 

Still it pulls, insistent — _come with me_ it calls. _Please, I miss you. I need you,_ it says. He cannot 

follow where he is bid. He feels he should. 

Then — it stops. 

The tiny thread of want disappears — is discarded. He is no longer pulled in any direction, he is merely floating, aimless, in a vacuum. 

The absence of anything is painful, somehow. He has no home. He has no memory. He is grieving over a life he cannot recall. He’s … he’s lonely. 

He closes his eyes and lets sleep wash over him. 

It doesn’t work. 

Dean is insistent — he double and triple checks the documents Sam compiled, the books they hunched over to find answers. Sam’s Latin is perfect, the sigils are exact, everything is as it should be, except there are only two people in the barn where there should be a third. There’s no rush of wings, no flash of magic, no rolling thunder.

Dean feels Castiel’s absence as strongly as a knife in his chest. He almost wishes the pain was physical, almost wishes it was a wound he could rinse and bandage with his hands — a routine he learned by rote far too young — instead of one that pulls slowly at him from the inside, tearing his heart to bits and feeling every ache the part of shrapnel. 

When he crumples against the wall and sobs silently, Sam steps out in some semblance of privacy. The wooden door hangs open, though, and Dean knows how sound carries. 

He cries anyway. 

For a time, he wonders. 

Was that just a fakery? An illusion created by the Empty to foster some sense of security — of hope — that someone would save him. 

Or, perhaps, was it a true attempt at rescue? Does someone miss him? Does someone want him back — for ulterior motives? As a pawn? Or perhaps somebody wanted to return him home. 

He can’t even recall home. 

He remembers … he remembers green eyes. He remembers being lost in them. 

And then he remembers nothing at all. 

Dean crouches in the grass. There are flowers here. 

He picks two — they’re dandelions, he thinks — and rolls the stems between his fingers. 

It’s been four months. 

Four months since Cas left. Three since he celebrated Christmas without him. Two since a lonely New Year’s. One since the spell.

He sighs, roughly, lets the sound rumble in his throat. 

“I miss you,” he says, aloud. The empty field, misty with the blue early morning, is silent. “Cas,” he adds, and that’s the first time he’s said that name for months, and —

And the fog clears. 

It divides cleanly, peels off into two clouds, leaving a passage between. Dean wonders if this is how Moses felt. But instead of asylum, of a promised land, there stands a single figure. 

“Cas!” he says, lowly, brokenly, and Castiel remembers his name.

Castiel approaches slowly, feeling out the weight of having a vessel once more. The man looks like a frightened animal, trembling in the grass. Slowly, he rises. 

“Cas,” he says again, desperately. 

Castiel gets a good look at his face, contorted with grief and confusion and longing — green eyes. Green eyes — green like the forest, green like new growth, green like soft grass and stained glass.

“Dean,” Castiel chokes, and he remembers it all. 

He lets it wash over him, lets Dean cling to his shirt, lets himself remember every smile and every significant look and every long drive and every late–night diner stop. “Dean,” he says again — and he’s home. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. Comments and kudos are appreciated.


End file.
